Is this Gaza’s ‘bomb the tracks’ moment?
Israelis look on as smoke rises from an Israeli military operation in the northern Gaza Strip, 23 July 2025
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man writes in +972 on 25 July 2025:
It is often said that Israel’s war on Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide. Hind Rajab’s tragic final pleas and breaths were broadcast across the internet for all to hear. Israeli soldiers proudly post videos of their atrocities and destruction on TikTok. Brave Palestinians have built massive social media followings, as viewers log on every day to witness their hunger, displacement, and terror. More people around the world have been exposed to near real-time, graphic images of killings and starvation than ever in history.
What is not unique about the genocide in Gaza is that world leaders — the only people with the means to stop it — have known about Israel’s actions, and its intentions, since day one. And they have done close to nothing to stop it.
The pleas of starving people, images of emaciated bodies, the dehumanization on which such cruelty and suffering is built remind me of the writings, images, and experiences of Jews whom the Nazis imprisoned and starved in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My mother was one of those people, a small child at the time, thrown into ever-increasingly crowded spaces with less and less food by the week.
Starving at Bergen-Belsen alongside my mother, perhaps in the same barracks, was Hanna Levy-Hass, mother of Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. Hanna was one of the few people to keep a diary throughout her time at Bergen-Belsen, which survived and was later published.
In February 1945, she wrote: “Hunger crushes the spirit. I feel my physical and intellectual strength diminishing. Things escape me, I can’t think properly, can’t grasp events, can’t realize the full horror of the situation.